Internet retailers and business-to-business (B2B) providers usually sell from on-line, electronic catalogs that include a range of goods and services. Although this approach works well for Internet retailers who sell to consumers drawn from the general population, business-to-business providers often have customers who demand specific terms and conditions. For example, customers may negotiate contracts with B2B providers that call for predetermined discounts, products that are not normally available to the general public, customer-specific service packages that accompany high-volume orders, and so forth.
Moreover, a given customer may specify that certain of its purchasing agents or buyers have authority to buy some products but not others, depending, for example, upon the agency or department that the buyer represents, or depending upon the buyer's geographical location. Also, some contracts may enable employees of the customer to buy from the provider under negotiated terms. For example, a high-volume customer who buys a large number of personal computers for business use may require the provider to sell the same personal computers at a discount to employees of the customer, but where the discount to an individual employee may be less than the discount to the high-volume customer, or where a service package available to an individual employee may be different from the service package available to the high-volume customer.
In pursuit of the flexibility needed to comply with the terms of individual contracts, a provider normally creates a custom catalog for each set of circumstances. As a result, a provider may have a multiplicity of custom catalogs. For example, the government of the fictitious State of Madison might require several different catalogs: a catalog for buyers who represent the Department of Public Safety, and a different catalog for buyers who represent the Department of Education. The Department of Education itself may require not only a custom catalog, but also individual catalogs that are further customized to reflect the differing missions of the Office of State Research Universities and the Office of K-6 Programs. In such a situation, buyers who represent the Office of Research Universities and buyers who represent the Office of K-6 Programs might not have the same buying authority, as their needs could differ greatly. For example, the Research Universities and the K-6 Programs may both need office supplies, but the Research Universities would not likely need crayons, nor the K-6 Programs need equipment for binding the pages of doctoral dissertations. Nevertheless, a buyer who represents the Department of Education more broadly on behalf of all the Department's Offices might well need to purchase any of the aforementioned items, and yet might also be barred from purchasing weapons made available to buyers who represent the State Highway Patrol.
These kinds of divisions of purchasing authority put a considerable burden on B2B providers. When an item changes in the provider's general catalog, the change may ripple through dozens of custom catalogs derived from the general catalog. As the need for custom catalogs splits and grows, the enormity of creating and updating the required catalogs, storing them, and processing their contents may in fact become a significant bottleneck in a B2B provider's ultimate capability to serve its existing customers and to accept new customers. Thus there is a need for a more efficient way to provide and manage electronic catalogs, so that buyers are enabled to view and purchase only appropriate subsets of the goods and services offered by an electronic B2B provider.